Blogging 109 Promotion

Promoting and marketing are very important when it comes to having a successful blog. You need to read and connect with other bloggers; it’s like being a part of a blogging community. When you link with other bloggers by reading and commenting on their blog post they will comment on yours in return. This is a great strategy that helps everyone.

 

Find other blogs that post on topics that are similar to yours and take time to read them. Leave comments with a link back to your blog. Remember that these post and comments are also indexed by search engines which mean more traffic sent your way. Reading and commenting on other blogs is a great way to promote your own blog.

 

More ways to market your blog

 

There are other ways to market your blogs besides the ones mentioned above. Begin by asking yourself two questions. What is the topic of your blog, and what makes it different from all the others? By doing this you will be able to come up with a description that will be appealing to people and something that they will remember after reading it. Once you have a good description copy and paste it to your URL and you are ready to move on to the next step.

 

 

This is where you take the description you came up with and begin to submit your blog to web directories, blog directories and of course search engines. You can submit to some of the smaller search engines as well as ones like Yahoo, MSN and Google. The smaller search engines feed the larger ones so it may even be a faster way to get your site indexed. Always include any directories that focuses on your niche.

 

Make your content available

 

If your content is not made available to others then you can not be successful. One great way to do this is with Feedburner. With feedburner you can make your content available in the ways listed below.

 

• Allows readers to subscribe to feeds by email
• Makes your feeds look attractive
• Places HTML versions of your feed on their sites
• They use a variety of feed readers
• Provide statistics to track your content popularity

 

Another great way to make your content available is by using Technorati. This is a wonderful place for bloggers to look for inspiration and resources. It is a great place to comment and link on blogs. Over fifty million blogs are used by Technorati therefore, millions of readers will be able to access your content if it is claimed and tagged correctly.

 

You can also use social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us as a way to make your content available. Use this service to tag your blog post a few times and if any make it to the popular pages you will definitely notice the increase in traffic. You will still have some readers stop by even if it doesn’t make the popular pages.

 

 

Most blogs are started by people that are genuinely interested in the topics that they write about. This is how it all got started with people writing about the things they love. However, with hundreds of programs available to help you, why not make some money from it also. Google Adsense provides contextual advertising that you can use on your blog post and they are the easiest one to use when getting started.

 

Contextual advertising is using ads based on the page content of the blog. As long as you stay on your topic and do your research well the ads will be relevant to your blog. Other ways to earn money include banner ads, RSS feeds and sponsored blog post. By simply inserting an ad into your post you can earn money.

 

Placing ads to promote products

 

How do you place ads in your blog? You start by deciding what products you want sell. After this decision has been made you need to incorporate promotional material into your blog to help with the sell of these products. When you do this you need to make changes to your blog template.

 

How to get banner ads

 

Banner advertisements are a great way to promote products. Affiliate programs have banners that are designed especially for their affiliates. This means that they can be found in different sizes to better fit in the blog. Some are small and fit in the sidebar of your blog while others could be rectangular and designed to fit above your content. To get the banner you need, go to your affiliate account and pick out the code that best fits your blog. You will want to save it on Notepad so it can also be used at a later date.

 

If you find that the item you want to promote does not already have its own banner then you can create one. You can visit an online logo creator site like Cooltext.com or simply use Photoshop or MS Paint to create a banner. Upload it to a free webspace that will host the banner or to your own webspace, it up to you. After the upload is complete all you need to do is write the code needed to make the banner show up on your blog. The following can help you write the code you need <a href=web address for your affiliate product'> <img src='location where the image is hosted'></a>.

 

Editing templates to place ads

 

You will need to edit templates to be able to place ads for your blog. To do this with a Blogger blog you start by going to the template section. From here you will see the banner code and you will need to decide where to place it. If you want it in the header, then place the code you copied in the header section. You can customize every part of your template to include advertising in this manner. After editing the files you will have to republish the blog.

 

Wordpress blogs can also be customized in this way because they have different files used for the header, sidebar, content and footer. They are all included in the wordpress folder labeled content/themes. After you have made the changes and edited the files on your wordpress blog you will need to upload the edited theme files to your server.

 

Contextual Ads

 

After you have placed banners for affiliate products you will then want to include ad codes for contextual advertising. We will use Adsense ads as an example to explain how this works. The first thing you need to do is grab your Adsense code. To do this log into your Adsense account and go to the setup section. Here select “Adsense for content” then simply pick out the type of ad you want to use. You have a choice between ad links and ad units and even get to choose the color of the ad.

 

Normally a “leaderboard” is used for the top of a page and for the navigation bar or sidebar usually a “Skyscraper” is used. After you have customized the ad to fit your blog copy the code into Notepad. This way you will already have it if you want to start up another blog. You will make money each time a person clicks on your ad because your publisher ID is embedded into the advertising code.

 

Placing your Adsense ads

 

Where you place your Adsense ads it is important to make sure you receive the best response to the ads as possible. You also want to make sure that you customize the ads to make them look more attractive. You can do this by removing the ad boarder and blending the colors with your templates to look better. Google suggests that you place the ads around your main content. This could be over the primary content or to the left of it. Another great spot is below the top navigation bar.

 

It is always a good idea to keep your customized ads in a text file. This way half the work will already be done for you if you decide to add new blogs. It will already be prepared to place into your blogger template. After changing the templates save your changes and check to see if you can view your ads. Keep in mind that it can take a few days before the correct ads begin to show. Don’t worry about this because the ads will soon begin to relate to your blog post. The more content you post the better the ads will relate.